


Life’s Rich Feast

by Jennifer-Oksana (JenniferOksana)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Assassins & Hitmen, Character Study, Dancing, Gen, Internal Monologue, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Misogyny, New Orleans, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-16 18:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5836843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenniferOksana/pseuds/Jennifer-Oksana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look into the mind of Alex Krycek.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life’s Rich Feast

I come out in the dark. I shun the light for obvious reasons; one being that what I do is suited to the shadow, that the sickly moon is a far better witness to the deeds of my hands.

My hand. I only have one arm now. But I could still kill a full-grown man without breaking a sweat. I’m good. It’s what I do.

Friday night in the city, no one’s looking too close, and I know I’m a good-looking man. I keep in shape. Lots of one-armed push-ups, har har har. But it’s Friday night, and I’m with the crowd.

What city? What town? What errand have I been sent on? Who the hell knows or cares. I don’t. I wander along the streets and realize, holy hell– I’m in the French Quarter. This is New Orleans. The Big Easy.

I only figured it out because of the architecture. If I relied on the smell, the crowds, or the cops, I could be anywhere, Rio, Tijuana, any city where corruption is thick and the parties slosh into the narrow streets, the stench of piss and alcohol as heavy as the cologne on the woman I jostle.

“Hey baby,” she said, slurring and batting her eyelashes. She is beautiful, maybe, blonde hair and dark eyes. Her breath is peaches. She tries to smile and fails.

“Hey baby,” I reply, and push past. Bourbon Street at eleven fifteen, crowds just starting to heat up, and I’m here but here doesn’t matter. I find a club, I get in, weave in and out up to a balcony. Heat, heat everywhere, bodies pressed together in merriment. A flesh market in the truest sense.

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die, idiots.

And we do die. They who know the truth around us, They with their plans and plots and schemes, They have no pity for we the people. The beautiful woman next to me could scream for mercy and go unheard. Mercy is for the weak. Justice is for the foolish. Innocence is for the dead.

I don’t want to die. The entire goal of my life is to survive, to fight whatever is there, the black oil, the hunters, to do what I can to survive and live. I’m no fucking philanthropist. I have no interest in saving anyone else. My skin is far more important to me than anyone else’s.

“Wanna dance?” someone asks.

I was approached for this work coming out of high school. I was going to join the Navy. It wasn’t precisely my first choice, but I didn’t want to go to college and getting a piss job in a factory was no good. So I took the tests.

And they found me.

“Alex Krycek?” they asked. Well, it wasn’t the name I used, but you know, same difference. “We have a proposition for you.”

“Sure,” I answer. Why not dance?

What the hell does an eighteen-year-old boy know? I got a job. Not military, but better. I got what every boy that age wants: freedom from rules. At first, before I understood about the colonization, the Project, when I was erased from society and became free of its mores and laws, it was like being on perpetual holiday. Rich, free, any woman I wanted (I was always a looker). Life was a pageant of delights.

Then Fate stepped in and took a hand. They asked me to replace the lovely Agent Scully, I think half on the theory that if Mulder hadn’t schtupped that lovely bit of womanflesh, he was probably queer as Rock Hudson and might respond better to a pretty boy. And I could be trusted. I liked my work. I was an asset.

I was not meant to work things like the X-Files. I wasn’t that deeply entangled in the heart of the Project, but working with Mulder, trying to do that work, it aged me. And when the order came down that they were going to send Scully away, I was shaken. I knew what went on there. And it hadn’t seemed real until someone I knew was taken for no other reason than she was in the way. Just a nice woman, smart and all, but she interfered, and had to be punished. It was the first time I ever questioned the morals of what I was doing.

It was the first time I realized it could happen to me, too.

I got away that time, but I was obsessed now, haunted by the world of Mulder, haunted by the truth. After that, I always asked for the assignments involving Mulder. It twisted me, I think. Hell, I don’t think, I know. Little ideas got in my head, and fear started to course through my veins. This time was the time I screwed up for the last time.

Killing Mulder’s father. That was a mistake for me to do. I never should have volunteered for that duty. But I was perfect for it– and you don’t betray my employers. You don’t do it. And with Mulder buzzed on LSD like he was, I should have died that day in a burst of adrenaline and gunshot.

But she interfered, Fate in the form of Agent Scully. I never understood how much you could love someone until she shot him. And I knew, whatever else was between them, not God nor Death nor the Devil in Hell could destroy the bond between them. And, given reprieve by this, I ran.

I didn’t want the job they gave me right after, to kill her, shut her mouth about the god-damned digital tape. But I’d kind of been working with Cardinal, and he was assigned the job. So I was assigned the job. But I accepted it as Fate again, that after all, with Mulder dead she was better off with him. Of course, we made a mistake. Melissa died, not Scully. These things happen.

“You’re a good dancer. What’s with your arm?” I hear, breaking me from my reverie.

A little secret. Before the X-Files, I never had to rationalize these things. I just did. I live, I act, I don’t separate myself from action with that evolutionary fault known as thought. Thought– the only thing men have used their reason for was justification of their actions. I didn’t justify. I just did.

Things have changed. My life entwined with theirs, for although Mulder was my original assignment and obsession, no one can separate Mulder and Scully. And when They tried to kill me, when I did screw up enough to warrant my death, I knew it was Mulder and Scully who had damned me to that. Their world took me whole.

“Lost it in an accident,” I say tersely.

I have risen and fallen in this dark world I inhabit. When I thought I might be able to live off the tape’s secrets, in business for myself, it was like coming back to the old ways. Free of rules, free of everything. Then I sold the wrong fucking secret about the wrong fucking ship. I was once the man with all the secrets, and I am the errand boy of my former masters. I do it all for survival. I am here to survive.

“That’s too bad.”

Death is my greatest enemy. It waits for when the music stops and then asks to dance, the invitation we cannot refuse. I evade it at every turn, coming as close as I dare then making a sharp turn from it.

“What sort of accident?”

The music plays, the dancing continues, the air is rich with decay and life, and all the movement makes me dizzy. The richness of life is around me, and all I can think of is that I’m trapped like a knight in a chess game. Not a pawn, but pretty useless in the end. Limited in motion. A pawn can become more, if they make it to the end of the board. Knights almost always lose.

“Amputated.”

As the walls close in on me, I feel ill. One more city, one more errand, one more night while the meaning of life, if there is any meaning, which I’ve always doubted– one more in a chain. Endless only because I can’t see the end. Remember, Alex, you will die.

“Sucks to be you, man.”

“Yeah, you have no idea.”

I’m not here to sightsee, no matter how interesting the sights. I’m not here to waste time. I have to be ready for the next assignment. They didn’t hire me to ponder, after all. Life will have to wait, I have other things to attend to.

“Where you going?”

I push my way out back into the street, and disappear like a shadow. Tell yourself that we’re only make believe, that in the light of day, these things don’t exist. Convince yourself that these are only nightmares. If I can do it, anyone can.

“I have something to take care of.”


End file.
